I Guess This Blog’s a Parenting Blog.

Originally posted on February 23, 2013

I can hear my son talking downstairs.  He’s talking to his daddy.  The way he talks now, it’s not little kid style anymore – he’s constructing conversations, asking real questions, making clear and abstract observations about the things around him.

Hearing him from up here, it’s making me think.

:::

About a year ago I bristled when a good friend commented that my blog was a parenting blog.

“What!?  No it’s not!  My life is about so much, the things I’m working through on the blog are about me, don’t you see that!?”  That’s an in-my-head quote, but my actual response wasn’t much more edited.

See, when Isla was three and Osi was about six months old, I broke.  I’d put our spirited girl to bed every night of her life for three years, and stayed home after doing so for the inevitable wake-up screams, FOR THREE YEARS.  It was a completely self-inflicted situation, me not being able to handle the thought of my girl screaming (which she could do like a champion), about the chaos I saw in my mind if I wasn’t at home, available.

It was some weeknight, some evening, and I sat down on the couch in the playroom in a daze.  Crying, missing, trampled.  ”I can’t do it tonight.  I can not do it,” I said to Tim.

“Go,” he said.

I went, and after much this-way-and-that, birthed myself new, decided that I was so much more than a Mama, that while my kids were clearly the most significant thing I had going on, that I needed to define myself as a woman.

:::

We went to Maine this week, to The Special House.  Where my dad is buried.  Where I got to marry Tim.

“If you took snapshots of every time we’ve come here together, you’d get a really clear idea of what our relationship is,” he said, eating breakfast at the red lacquered kitchen table.

“I like that,” I said.

There’s no phone, no television, no Wi-Fi at the cabin.  The kids have no technological expectations, and are thus completely happy and satisfied with the box of coloring supplies, paper, and fort-worthy couch that live there full-time.  They played together, mostly happily, for four days, with little more than their bountiful imaginations.  Isla made collages and practiced writing letters and numbers while Osiah walked around the house singing “Hard Way Home” with a spoon-microphone.

I read a book.  Tim fixed the damper on the fireplace.

We held back tears as we pulled out of the yard on Thursday.

:::

My quest for more-ness is bringing me back around, as quests seem to do.

When I set out to prove that I was more than just a mother, I was a tight ball of imbalance, a girl lost in responsibilities.  I sense now that I was grieving the real loss of my old life, a completely valid and healthy thing to grieve.

I’ve for so long been an all-or-nothing kind of gal.  I became all mama in ways that don’t, now, surprise me.

And then, when all became too much, I tried to become all something else.

Which is clearly impossible since you can’t undefine yourself as a mother, nor would I ever want to.

Picking pieces from then and now and rolling them up, into the moment.

I think that’s it.

For now.

*E

They Find Great Meaning in the Telephone Book.

Originally posted on February 25, 2013

We currently have three typewriters in our house – one electric, two manual.

The children have the electric one set up in their space, and they’re free to type on it whenever they like.  They’ve learned how to load paper, how important it is to hit only one key at a time, how to un-stick the letter arms when they forget and get overzealous.

We keep our laptops and iPhones and iPads hidden from view.  We have no television set up in our home.  Music is on constantly, and the dock for the iPod sits atop the fridge, out of reach.

There’s also a Tivoli radio up there, the old-fashioned looking turn-dial kind, which makes things look quaint and retro and sleek.  We listen to news and talk radio.  The other night I happened upon a conversation on our local all-news NPR station.  There were British voices, at least four, and they were talking about the differences between meaningful and happy, how so many of us strive toward happy when it’s really meaning we seek, how a meaningful life isn’t always a happy one.

I found this idea refreshing.  It made me think about the push and pull of social media, about my magnetic draw toward it and my simultaneous disdain.  About how I often seek meaning and happiness on-line, how I long to feel important by checking Facebook and seeing the little red notifications number.  About feeling disappointed if the number is lower than I hoped it would be.

And yet it needles me that in order to know about important news in my friends’ lives, I need to be online with regularity.  Friends go through major life changes, and I only know because of Facebook.  I’m reluctant to leave the social media world because of the connections I do get to make.  But I’m curious about how much more meaningful my experiences might seem if they happened the old-fashioned way, via phone or e-mail.

Or typewriter.

Yes, it’s full of affectation, of purposeful backward time travel.  But the idea of writing a letter, of hearing the click and the clack, of licking an envelope and pouring time and clear intention into one person at a time – well, it’s appealing.  I like the feeling it gives me when I think about it.  I like the idea of typing alongside my children.  I feel inspired when I think of adorning letters and envelopes with art and scribbles and doodles, of people receiving missives in the mail unexpectedly, of the love that feels like.

I don’t want to live in denial about how we communicate now. But I sure to like the idea of giving my relationships more real focus, more real meaning.

So please excuse me while I begin to collect addresses.

*E

A Bonk On The Head Will Take You Places.

Originally posted on March 19, 2013

My kids told me a story tonight at dinner.

Osiah began to speak of sharks.  ”There were so, so many.  They were overflowing.”

“Yeah, and then everybody wanted to kill all the sharks,” said scared-of-things-with-big-teeth girl.

“YEAH, and then a dolphin came.  And there was a glass race car it went FWOOSH.”

Back and forth like this for many, many minutes, each one rapt while waiting their turn, eyes wide, listening closely.

“And then the ocean started getting higher and higher because everyone was crying,” said girl.

And that’s when I lost my breath.

:::

Isla slipped and fell tonight.  I was going in for a tickle, and she squealed and turned to run, forgetting that her feet wore tights.  Head cracked kitchen island in the way where you know to look for damage.  When none seemed apparent, I was skeptical and went to get the pack from the freezer.  When I turned, the welt was already a half-inch off her head, a visible line down the center where she’d hit the drawer handle.  I tended, tears were dried.  She’s now sleeping, and I’m checking her compulsively.

As I lay with Osiah on the bottom bunk, willing him to sleep so I could again make sure she was breathing, I, of course, began to think about her dying.  I ran through some of the potential scenarios, about how our night had been going up until her slip.  About a 911 call, about an empty bunk bed.

(Pause to check on sleeping girl…)

As my mind began to loop, there was a thought – I can’t remember now what it was – but there was a thought that made my body go rigid, that made me inhale sharply.

And then, the next thought was this: no matter what you do, she is going to die.

This had never occurred to me before.  The hope is always, always, that the parents, having lived fulfilling and generous lives, live healthfully into old age and then die gracefully.

My thought train has always ended there – with the parental victory of expiring before my children.  I’ve never once, not until tonight, thought about what happens after that.  About how, if we were to be blessed by the goodness of such a scenario, they’d keep going and grow old, too.

About how their paths are as inevitable as mine.

About how the fierceness of my will and my boundless desire to protect them will, in the end, bear no fruit.

“And then the ocean started getting higher and higher because everyone was crying.”

These tears, tonight’s tears, are swimming and swirling together into a big ol’ pool of love.

Love, higher and higher.

*E

Monday Morning Mini-Muse.

Originally posted on March 25, 2013 

I love where I work.  This fact is well-established.  Yesterday, I was there for 13 hours, working harder than maybe I’ve ever worked in my whole life.

13 hours is a long time to be inside instead of out, to be away from my little familia, to be standing upright and walking around getting getting getting things.

At hour thirteen, nearly delirious, I sat beside my co-workers as we finished up the last of our tasks.  I listened to people talking in hushed voices, listened to others screaming with laughter.  I thought about the meal(s) they’d fed me, the espresso my boss had made because he knew I needed it, the needling I’d gotten when people realized that, in between shifts, I was grouchy, rooting through my make-up bag like a “rabid animal”.  I sat there, delirious and smiling.  Because it’s kind of a revelation, a place like this.

I came home, laughed with my husband.  Kids slipped into our bed.

And today, just down the road, the new community farm is having a well dug.

They’re down there, digging deep inside, for something they’re sure they’ll find.

*E

Click, Click, Click.

Originally Posted on April 7, 2013 

I’m hearing the ‘clicks’ everywhere, the syncing up of things that matter.

It’s started to feel like this is our time.  I first noticed it yesterday, at Isla’s birthday party.  There were people everywhere, big ones and little ones.  Things felt crazy for a bit, big and loud and birthday-like, and then later, calm.  Familiar.  Regular.  Our people were there for lunch, stayed through the mayhem, and we sat around, like we do every year on Isla’s birthday-party-day, soaking up the early-spring sunshine.  Girls ran around with bare feet and winter coats.  The grill sizzled hot.  There were quiet conversations on the steps and booming laughter from over there.  It was lovely – we all said so.

Click.

And then it was me thinking about this summer, the one that’s coming, thinking about how damn town-proud I’ve become.

I love Greenfield.  I love it here.  At work, I often meet folks who are thinking of moving here, and I’ve quickly turned into an accidental ambassador.

When we lived in the Hills, I was as snobbish as many others about Greenfield.  ”I will never, ever live there.”  I was so proud of the fact that I lived just over the hill, in the Falls or even further out, way up in the Hills. It was good there, clean and cozy and pure in some long-forgotten way.  Greenfield, dingy and sketchy, wasn’t good enough for me.

Because I am so important.  So, so important.

And then, of course, reality.  Budgets.  Being woefully under-qualified for a mortgage.

“There’s this house I drove by one time.  It was For-Sale-By-Owner.  Let’s drive by,” said Tim, the night we’d looked at the last house within our budget in one of the towns we were willing to live in.

We drove by at dusk, by the house in Greenfield, and I gasped and said aloud, “That’s our house.”

A few months later we were living in said house, and I remember the day I drove down Leyden Rd., right where it turns into Conway St., thinking, “Moving here’s been seamless.  There wasn’t even an adjustment period.”

Click.

And since I so completely live here now, this summer is the summer of gettin’ in it.

My kids will be Greenfield kids.

I will be a Greenfield woman.

We will buy a pass to the Pool, the dammed-up-river-turned-chlorine-free-summertime-swimming-spot.  We will sit there day after day, eating sandy sandwiches.  I will read, wear stylish sunglasses, and glance up and over at my kids, watching them become rooted in the town we chose for them.

I’m here.

They’re here.

This is where we grow.

Click.

*E